April 8, 2007

I'm still fried from that long drive yesterday. Can I get back to blogging about the news? There's the Sunday NYT over in the corner of the table, nicely sorted to include only the sections I like to read. But I got the NYT along with room service breakfast for the last five days, and, though I kept meaning to get to it, I never did. I disconnected from the news all week, even though I kept blogging. In fact, one of the main things we did was hang around in cafés, and, yeah, we had our laptops.

I concentrated on photographs, and I still have lots more photographs to go.

For example, if I go back to last Sunday, we were having the best all-you-can-eat meal I'd ever seen:

Can you tell how good that is? Smoked fish, carpaccio, duck....

The orange roses of Texas:

Mesmerizingly lit.

But I must get unmesmerized today somehow.

ADDED: Wow, I really am frazzled. I forgot to say that the restaurant is The Café at The Four Seasons. At $40 a person, it's really an amazing bargain, and I'm saying that as someone who filled the plate once (and ate everything on it).

17 comments:

Austin has a ridiculously large number of restaurants per capita and has done for years. Eating out is a major activity, and bad restaurants tend to disappear fairly quickly. Another interesting aspect of the scene is the number of post-grads who hang around and wait tables in order to remain in the area. I don't think that includes lawyers, though. Or at least, not very many...

You averaged 65 MPH, that is very hard to do. You must have a good radar detector or the cops were chasing the Easter bunnies and otherwise occupied. I'm impressed. There are very few people that are capable of such a sustained effort.

The Austin Four Seasons is a great place; I played at the reception for a half-Italian, half-Jewish wedding there one time. Great fun--the groom was quite toasted (in multiple ways) by the end of the night.

I understand the reluctance to tear oneself away from loved ones, but what a grinder you put yourself through! I've given up the long hauls because if something does go wrong on a trip I want to be as fresh as possible to deal with it. Excuse me, my before dinner nap calls.

I have fond memories of that hotel. I stayed there on the recruiting trip back in the early 1990s.

Then, Mark Lemley (Stanford now, but UT back then) had his patent and computer law conferences there. I spoke at a couple, and hung out at a lot more. Indeed, I figured out the timing to catch the speakers as they came out of the speakers dinner (so I wouldn't actually have to attend the seminars), and would go with them down (actually, from there, up) town, bar hopping, esp. along east 6th Steet. I met a number of very interesting people there, most of whom were Lemley's law prof friends, including several of the Volokh Conspirators (esp. Eugene).

Back then, computer law was somehow new and exciting. And these were some of the brightest lights in that field. Most were younger than I, though that didn't seem to matter much. And because of all that, those computer law seminars at the 4 Seasons somehow always seemed special.

Ruth Anne: No, I waved the mimosas away and drank straight orange juice. I never drink before 5 ... or maybe 4 under the right circumstances. I even talked to Chris that day about how I couldn't understand wanting to drink that early in the day. I know this will disappoint the anti-Althousianists.